Weaning yourself off LiveJournal: RSS feeds

You’ve probably forgotten this series; I almost had. I got all but one of the posts written, and then had an attack of life. Well, there’s one left, and this is it.

Let’s say you’ve set up your archive of fanwork, picked a theme you like, installed plugins, and so forth. Now you need to help the world read your stuff. (Assuming you want to, of course; I realise there are some people who prefer to keep their work under the radar, so those people will have to pick and choose which of the following tips to follow.)

Of course, people can always visit your site to see if you’ve updated anything lately, but a better way is to provide RSS feeds and other means for people to subscribe to your site. That way, they’ll be notified whenever you post anything new: either in their RSS reader of choice, or via LJ, or even by email.

Here’s how to do it.

The basic RSS feed

Wordpress gives you an RSS feed automatically; there are probably links to it on your site already, and your browser may show the orange RSS icon. Clicking on these will probably prompt you to subscribe to the feed somehow or other… assuming you’re set up for that. However, some people’s browsers aren’t RSS savvy, or people don’t have an RSS feeder set up, or whatever, so we’re going to build some extra stuff on top of the basic feed.

Better RSS with Feedburner

I use Feedburner to make my RSS feeds nicer. Feedburner offers a few features that help your readers, such as a friendly “how to subscribe” page, “add to del.icio.us” links right in the feed, and so on, but in my opinion the biggest benefit is that it tracks how many readers you have.

Anyway, here’s what to do:

* Go to Feedburner and sign up for an account
* Next, “Burn a feed”. You’ll need to provide your blog’s URL. Simply type it in the text box provided and hit “Next”.
* Feedburner will pick up the URL of your RSS feed (it’s in the HTML head section, as an “alternate” link, if you’re interested in knowing how). It may pick up more than one, in which case just pick any of them; I usually use the first one (RSS 2.0) but it shouldn’t matter much.
* Feedburner will now pick up your blog’s title, and give you a URL. You shouldn’t need to change anything here, so just hit “Next” again. (Don’t worry if the URL looks funny; nobody will really see it anyway.)

You’ll see something like this:

* Click “Next” again to head through to further configuration options
* Choose “Clickthroughs” and the “I want more!” option; Feedburner currently offers “Pro” features for free, so you might as well use them.
* Finally, you’ll find yourself at a page saying that you’re all set up, and that you need to make some changes to Wordpress to have it all take effect. You want “Self hosted Wordpress”.
* Install the plugin they link to (see earlier posts in this series to learn how) and activate it via the “Plugins” screen.
* In your Wordpress admin area, go to “Options” then “Feedburner”, then type in the URL that Feedburner set up for your feed

And you’re done! If you go to your blog page and click on the orange RSS icon or any link to the RSS feed (either on the page itself, or your browser may display the RSS feed icon in your location bar), the feed will be redirected through Feedburner. If your browser doesn’t happen to know how to deal with RSS feeds, you’ll be shown a user-friendly subscription page; if it already knows how to deal, then you probably won’t notice any difference.

Feedburner stats and counters

Feedburner shows you subscription stats for your feed. You can see them by going to “My Feeds” then clicking on the name of a feed. They only update once daily, so don’t bother clicking obsessively.

If you want to show the stats on your site, perhaps to encourage others to subscribe, or just to avoid having to visit Feedburner’s site to see how your stats are doing, you can use the widget that Feedburner provides.

* Go to your feed’s page in Feedburner
* Click “Publicize” in the tabs at the top
* Click “Feedcount” in the side menu
* Choose colours to match your theme
* Click “Activate”
* Copy the HTML provided and put it somewhere suitable in your theme’s HTML; I usually set it up as a widget (“Presentation”, “Widgets”, then drag a text widget to the sidebar, click on the little icon to pop up the widget’s configuration, and paste the HTML into it)

Here’s how I set mine up:

Email subscriptions

Feedburner also offers email subscriptions. Here’s how to set them up:

* From the “Publicize” tab, choose “Email subscriptions” in the right menu bar
* Click “Activate”
* You’ll be given a big chunk of HTML to paste somewhere. It can go just about anywhere, but because it’s wider than most sidebars can handle, I usually create a page (“Write”, “Page”) called “Subscribe by email” or similar, and then simply link to that from the sidebar.

Syndicating to LiveJournal

Just because you have your own non-LJ fan archive doesn’t mean that you don’t want people on LiveJournal to be able to find your stuff. One easy way is to provide a syndicated feed to LiveJournal.

* Go to http://livejournal.com/syn/
* Type in the address of your Wordpress blog
* It’ll ask you for an LJ username to give the feed. This will have to be unique.
* You can see the syndication details, or add the syndicated feed to your friends list, at `http://yourfeed.livejournal.com/profile`. You might want to add that link to your sidebar, saying “Add to LiveJournal friends” or similar.

Once the syndication is set up, you can encourage people to friend it just as they would any other LJ user or community. A few points to note, however:

* You have to be a paid LJ user to set up syndicated feeds. If you’re not a paid user, perhaps you could ask a friend to do it for you.
* Any comments made on the LJ-syndicated post will disappear after a fairly short time; I think LJ only keeps about 10 posts for any syndicated feed. So you might want to discourage people from commenting there, if you can.
* The number of subscribers via LJ (and email as well) will be counted in your Feedburner stats. Because all the feeds are redirected through Feedburner by the plugin you installed earlier, Feedburner is able to count them all.

And here’s the end result

Here’s the end result: my sidebar widget with all the subscription options listed, and the Feedburner counter.

As you can see, I’ve changed my theme since last time I posted about my fannish Wordpress site. If you want to go check it out, and see all the things I’ve done as I’ve been posting this series of articles, you can visit it at A Room Of One’s Own.